Carrollton, Ga. — Jon Ossoff’s defeat in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District election on Tuesday wasn’t just a sign that Democrats may have a harder time winning in the Trump era than they had hoped. It is a symptom of a larger problem for the party — a generational and racial divide between a largely secular group of young, white party activists and an older electorate that is more religious and more socially conservative.

Daniel K. Williams has made significant contributions in the past to establishing historical truths that fall between (or in conflict with) both political parties. I don´t know him personally, but my impression is he is a Christian, determined to research, publish, and speak the truth regardless of whose toes get stepped on.

That makes me wonder if there is some intended tongue-in-cheek in this editorial. Williams says the Democrats current religion problem is that--unlike previous generations of Democrats--young, secular Democrats don´t know how to camoflage what they believe with religious sounding language.

So in the matter of style vs. substance, Democrats have a religion problem when their style reveals their substance.

Intentionally or not, this article is a reiteration of Rush Limbaugh´s longstanding accusation that Progressive Democrats CAN´T say what they really believe or what they really want to do, because they´d only get 20% of the vote!

Because they really believe most Americans are despicable. They hate us. They really do. The vulgar endorsements of violence that one after another of them keep "apologizing" for when they´re caught -- that´s what they really believe.

That´s also why progressive audience laugh too hard when a speaker dips into f-bombs, or jokes about crude vengeance against conservatives. It´s laughter curdled with hatred. It´s not genial.

This writer is really straining to define past Dem Prez candidates as being Christian:McCarthy and R. Kennedy were Christians because they "found inspiration in the church’s teachings." (Being inspired by teachings does not a Christian make)..."Jimmy Carter was a Southern Baptist deacon who regularly taught an adult Sunday school class during his 1976 campaign for president" (Teaching a SS class doesn´t make one a Christian. One wonders what he taught since he was personally against abortion, but didn´t deny women the right to kill their babies)...

"Jesse Jackson, who won several primaries in 1984 and 1988, was an ordained minister." (How many boxtops did he send in for that ordination? Maybe his love-child knows.) "Al Gore was a Southern Baptist who had attended divinity school." (If THAT makes him a Christian, then why didn´t Palin´s small colleges make her a qualified candidate? I´m not arguing that Gore absorbed divinity at school...just that he absorbed the candy kind, not the spiritual kind.) "Bill Clinton had deep roots in the Southern Baptist tradition" (I guess if your parents and grandparents were Christian, you´re automatically deemed a Christian)..."Hillary Clinton frequently cited her Methodist faith as a source of her values." (Do the Methodists realized that they´ve just been libeled? Wait - does this church of the rainbow flag realize anything?) "And Barack Obama, despite a secular (read Muslim)upbringing, learned to speak in the theological cadences of a Protestant Christian tradition while attending a progressive African-American church in Chicago." (Speaks like a preacher, so he must be a Christian. Attended a "progressive" church. May the progressive god bless him.)Pretty weak case you make, Mr. Writer, that these Dem candidates are/were Christian.

I fear, #7, if you´d continued quoting from the article you´d have eventually proved the falsity of your own accusation.

Does the writer even ONCE say that any of the Democrats he mentioned is or was a Christian?

I think Williams knows what a Christian is, because he took great pains in the article to avoid conflating being a minister, Sunday School teacher, church elder, or seminary student with actually being a Christian.

Williams´ point was that these older Democrats had rubbed shoulders with Christians and knew how to come across like one--a rather damning compliment among most voters.

"Pundits should have fixed terms,” left-wing author Naomi Klein recently told the BBC. Awarded “jobs for life,” most professional commentators — whether opining in newspaper columns like this one or blathering on television — suffer no consequence for making predictions that turn out “spectacularly wrong.” Klein’s (partly tongue-in-cheek) solution? Hold our pundits to account by making them reapply for their sinecures every four years, banishing those whose prognostications prove most wide of the mark. The socialist Klein’s embrace of market forces, however selective, is welcome. Might I offer the unfolding horror in Venezuela as the first litmus test

These are dangerous days for Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s brain. A new book about the White House chief strategist portrays the president as the empty vessel into which Mr. Bannon poured his ideology and agenda, propelling the two of them into the White House. The book, “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency,” by Joshua Green, a reporter who has known Mr. Bannon for years, is a best seller that gives Mr. Trump second billing. That’s made the empty vessel very angry.

When players get political, it turns out that fans can get political right back. After months of speculation and piles of anecdotal evidence, market-research company J. D. Power has weighed in with real data. After surveying 9,200 fans, researchers found that “national anthem protests were the top reason that NFL fans watched fewer games last season.” The protests were never popular. A September 2016 Reuters poll indicated that a super-majority of 72 percent of Americans believed the protests, led by Colin Kaepernick, were “unpatriotic,” but evidence that his protest had an impact on ratings was spotty, at best.

It’s heartening to see that President Trump’s weeklong, passive-aggressive assault on his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has crossed a line even for many of the president’s most stalwart supporters. Rush Limbaugh called Mr. Trump’s behavior “unseemly” on his radio show Monday. Of Mr. Sessions he said, “I hate to see him being treated this way.” Over in the Trump-friendly confines of Fox News, Tucker Carlson said the president’s humiliation of the attorney general was “a useless, self-destructive act,” and Mr. Carlson implored Mr. Trump: “For God’s sake, lay off Jeff Sessions. He’s your friend, one of the very few you

Let’s review a few recent developments. Last week, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, resigned. This was part of a “White House shakeup” to get the Trump administration back on track. The new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, would fix the White House’s “messaging problem.” Within 24 hours of Scaramucci’s appointment, the president returned to Twitter and unloaded another torrent of political bombshells, including talking about his power to pardon, even as his attorneys were denying that Donald Trump was thinking about pardoning anyone.

It costs as little as $10 and as much as $10,169 to get the same blood test in California. A lower-back M.R.I. priced at $199 at one Florida clinic goes for $6,221 in San Francisco. A shoulder X-ray can run anywhere between $21 and more than $700 across the United States. In Spain, a 30-day supply of Truvada, which helps prevent H.I.V.-AIDS, costs an average of $559, according to data compiled by the International Federation of Health Plans. In the United States it’s $1,301. In Britain, the average price of an angioplasty is $7,264 versus $31,620 in the United States.

Carrollton, Ga. — Jon Ossoff’s defeat in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District election on Tuesday wasn’t just a sign that Democrats may have a harder time winning in the Trump era than they had hoped. It is a symptom of a larger problem for the party — a generational and racial divide between a largely secular group of young, white party activists and an older electorate that is more religious and more socially conservative.

Even if the country were to descend into widespread unrest, it wouldn’t look like the unrest of 50 years ago. One month into 1968, the Vietnamese celebrated their new year and the Viet Cong launched its Tet Offensive. The chief of the South Vietnamese national police was photographed executing a captured Viet Cong officer, horrifying viewers across the world. Communist forces rapidly overran most of Hue, and hundreds of U.S. Marines were killed taking it back over the following month.

The Australian authorities are treating an abduction and a killing near Melbourne on Monday, which ended with the gunman dead, as a terrorist attack. The police killed the gunman after he held a woman hostage at an apartment complex in Brighton, one of Melbourne’s wealthiest suburbs. The woman was rescued, and another man was found dead in the lobby, the police said. The authorities did not immediately identify the victims. The police identified the gunman as Yacqub Khayre, an Australian citizen with a long criminal record who came to the country from Somalia as a child refugee.

This week, two of Donald Trump’s top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project. It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs. It grows out of a worldview that life is a competitive struggle for gain. It implies that cooperative communities are hypocritical covers for

No liberal has standing to call any Republican stupid as long as Patty Murray remains in the U.S. Senate. Soon after being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992, Murray went on a radio show and said: "When I was growing up, the big fear in my life was the nuclear war. I remember second- and third-grade teachers giving us skills to deal with it, if that big alarm goes off, which was ´Hide under your desk.´Would that do any good? I don't know. But as a child, that gives you a feeling there's something to do beyond panic. Today the biggest fear our kids live with is whether ... the kid beside them has a gun. We have to give them skills so

The New York Times reviewed videos and photos to track the actions of 24 men, including armed members of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s security detail, who attacked protesters in Washington last week. Many of the protesters were American citizens. The men kicked people lying on the ground and put a woman in a chokehold just a mile from the White House. They outnumbered the protesters nearly two to one.

Malia Obama lost her iPhone at Lollapalooza in Chicago over the weekend. The former first daughter was spotted doing some wild dance moves at the music festival, and was captured on video jamming and rolling around on the floor with a friend while the Killers performed. Unfortunately, due to her energetic moves, Malia also lost her phone, and was later seen visiting a Chicago Apple Store with Secret Service agents in tow. A witness told us, “Malia came into the Apple Store to get her iPhone replaced, but things didn’t go exactly [as planned]. The Apple Store couldn’t immediately help

California Democratic Representative Maxine Waters wouldn’t rule out the concept of an all-black political party when asked about it on Monday. Waters joined “The Breakfast Club” radio show on Monday morning and was asked if it was time for black people to form their own political party. “No, not at this point,” Waters said. “You have to show that you’re willing and you’re able to put the numbers together and exercise your influence.” “We still are not voting our influence yet,” she continued. “What we should do is organize our power, exercise our power, particularly in the Democratic Party because

Three-quarters of Americans do not trust President Trump, according to a new CNN poll published Monday night. Six months into his presidency, 38 percent of those polled said they approve of Trump´s performance, while 56 percent say they disapprove. Trump is also faring worse with his base, the poll showed. Among Republicans, his strong approval rating fell from 73 percent in February to 59 percent now. Among non-college educated white people, 35 percent of those polled strongly approve of Trump, down 12 points since February. The CNN poll was conducted by SSRS by telephone Aug. 3 through Aug. 6 among

Rep Maxine Waters (D-CA) has been getting quite a bit of attention lately for her strong opposition to President Trump and frequent calls for his impeachment. She called President Trump “the worst” president she’s ever seen in a recent interview with “The Breakfast Club” saying he “believes in nothing. I think he believes in nothing," Waters said. "I think that he cares about nothing. I think that he´s capable of doing outrageous things. I believe it is possible to impeach him,” she said. “How long is it going to take? I don´t know, but I give it to about December."

When former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and President Bill Clinton were busted secretly meeting aboard Lynch´s private plane last summer by a local television reporter, a number of government watchdog groups filed lawsuits for documents surrounding the meeting. After all the FBI, under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice, was actively investigating Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information at the time. In response to information requests, the FBI and DOJ said documents didn´t exist. Fast forward more than a year and it turns out hundreds of documents related to the meeting do exist and show the Department

The Republican Party should have cut off Donald Trump’s “birther” movement in its infancy, an anti-Trump Republican senator said Sunday. Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona said he regrets that his fellow Republicans kept quiet years ago as Trump rallied his phony conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. “I wish that we, as a party, would have stood up...when the birtherism thing was going along,” Flake said on NBC News´ “Meet the Press.” “That was particularly ugly.” Flake also condemned his party for supporting Trump’s “lock her up” campaign rally chants about Hillary Clinton,

Hillary Clinton wants to preach. That’s what she told Bill Shillady, her long-time pastor, at a recent photo shoot for his new book about the daily devotionals he sent her during the 2016 campaign. Scattered bits of reporting suggest that ministry has always been a secret dream of the two-time presidential candidate: Last fall, the former Newsweek editor Kenneth Woodward revealed that Clinton told him in 1994 that she thought “all the time” about becoming an ordained Methodist minister. She asked him not to write about it, though: “It will make me seem much too pious.” The incident perfectly captures

The Department of Justice on Friday released 413 pages of emails related to a controversial private meeting between former President Bill Clinton and then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch during the FBI’s investigation into then-presidential-candidate Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi emails. The FBI said earlier such records did not exist. This discharge of information is the result of a lawsuit filed against the DOJ by the American Council for Law and Justice (ACLJ) in November 2016. The newly-released emails mostly include DOJ officials’ conversations with reporters, who were seeking comment on the meeting between Lynch and the former president on an airport tarmac in

President Trump´s approval rating dropped 5 percentage points in August to a new low of 32%, according to the latest IBD/TIPP Poll, with 59% saying they disapprove of the job he´s doing as president. Trump lost significant support across the board, but saw big declines among areas of core support, including Republicans, Midwesterners, middle-income families, white men and the high-school educated. The results come in the wake of the Senate´s failure to repeal ObamaCare, upheavals in the White House staff, the ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the election, and the daily beatings administered by the mainstream press. Among Republicans, for example,

While President Trump spends the next two weeks away from the White House, scores of workers will undertake the next steps in a long-planned renovation of the West Wing. White House staffers have been relocated while stairs and leaks are repaired, electrical systems upgraded, walls repainted, drapes cleaned and a modernized system of heating and air conditioning is installed. The massive 24/7 repair work area is an ideal metaphor for the troubled Trump administration rolling toward its eighth month. [Snip] However, one serious problem remains unaddressed – the deteriorating relations between the Republican president and the Republican Congress, something that

Deyon Kaigler said in December that he was done stealing cars. His friends were still posting videos of high-speed joyrides to Facebook, wearing key fobs on lanyards around their necks. But Deyon, 16, had decided it was too dangerous. "I value my life," he said. "I´m not trying to be dead." Just eight months later, on Sunday morning, three boys died and Deyon was led away in handcuffs after a fiery, high-speed crash sent a stolen Ford Explorer pinwheeling through the air down Tampa Road in Palm Harbor, bursting into flames. Eight teenage car thieves from Pinellas have now died in the

Donald Trump is the reigning king of American victimhood. He is unceasingly pained, injured, aggrieved. The primaries were unfair. The debates were unfair. The general election was unfair. “No politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly,” he laments. People refuse to reach past his flaws — which are legion! — and pat him on the back. People refuse to praise his minimal effort and minimal efficacy. They refuse to ignore that the legend he created about himself is a lie. People’s insistence on truth and honest appraisal is so annoying. It’s all so terribly unfair.